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The Mayflower Love Children: Elinor, Jasper, Richard and Mary More

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For centuries, historians thought the four young More children who arrived on the Mayflower were homeless orphans. Not until 1959 did a document surface that revealed the truth. They were the Mayflower love children, landed gentry descended from King Edward III and banished by their cuckolded father.

What kind of person tears four little children from their mother and puts them in the hands of strangers? Then sends them on a difficult, dangerous 3,000-mile voyage, to a likely death in a forbidding wilderness? That person even had them indentured as servants – including little four-year-old Mary.

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The Mayflower

The short answer is an angry, bitter, self-righteous and well-connected Puritan. Samuel More, after banishing his children, would later cause the deaths of others in his charge.

The Mayflower Love Children

The story begins with Katherine More, the daughter of Jasper More, a Shropshire bailiff who built Larden Hall with his own hands.

Jane Small, Katherine More’s grandmother

Larden Hall sat on 1,000 acres of land, but Jasper More had no male heirs to inherit his property. His sons had died, and English law prohibited women from inheriting property. Jasper’s cousin, Richard More, was a respected parliamentarian who also owned an estate, Linley, in Shropshire, close to the Welsh border. And Richard had an unmarried son.

So Jasper and Richard made an arrangement. Katherine, 25, would marry Richard’s 17-year-old son, Samuel. Richard also paid Jasper 600 pounds for Larden Hall. Thus the estates would remain in More family hands.

But Katharine already had a partner closer to her own age, a yeoman farmer at Larden Hall named Jacob Blakeway. They later claimed they had a betrothal agreement.

Mayflower plaque in St. James Church in Shipton, Shropshire commemorating the More children baptism. courtesy of Phil Revell

But on February 4, 1610 (O.S.), Katherine More married Samuel More. Over the next six years they had four children: Elinor, or Ellen, baptized on May 24, 1612; Jasper, baptized Aug. 8, 1613; Richard, baptized Nov. 13,1614; and Mary, baptized April 16, 1616.

Court Battles

Samuel spent a great deal of time in London as secretary to Lord Edward Zouche, a family friend. Zouche was a diplomat and an investor with the Virginia Company. While Samuel was away, Katherine and Jacob did play—or so Samuel concluded. By 1616, he decided the More children looked a lot more like Jacob Blakeway than they looked like him. He accused Katherine of adultery.

 

Lord Edward Zouche

Katherine didn’t deny the accusation. She said Jacob Blakeway was her husband. She then tried to get an annulment from Samuel. But unfortunately for Katherine, the witnesses to their betrothal contract had died. Had they survived and testified, the Blakeway family could have lived happily ever after.

Custody Fight

Samuel, with his father’s help, went to court to cut the four children out of his will. Then he hatched a plan to get rid of them.

First, he sent the children to live with a tenant on his estate, out of the reach of their mother. Katherine tried and tried to get them back. She discovered the tenants’ cottage where Samuel had stashed them and went there to see them. According to court documents, she then tried to take them away. “[I]n a hail of murderous oaths, [she] did teare the clothes from their backes,” the record stated. However, she failed.

Between December 1619 and July 8, 1620, Katherine and Samuel took their custody battle to court 12 times. Unfortunately for Katherine, the ultimate decision rested with the Privy Council – and Samuel’s friend and employer, Lord Zouche, served as a privy counselor. And so, unsurprisingly, the Privy Council denied Katherine’s final appeal on July 8, 1620.

Human Trafficking

When Katherine’s appeal failed, Samuel had a cousin take the four little children to London. From there they’d be delivered to the group of Puritans who intended to establish a colony in the New World. Not coincidentally, Zouche had invested £100 in the Virginia Company, which financed the Mayflower’s voyage to North America.

In London, the More children stayed with the disreputable Thomas Weston, a merchant who dealt with the Pilgrims. Someone described him as “eager to reap quick profits from the New World, and not very scrupulous about the means.”

Weston took the children to Philemon Powell, later convicted as a smuggler. Powell delivered them to the Pilgrims’ agents in London. They were then parceled out as indentured servants. Elinor, the oldest at eight, went to Edward Weston. Jasper, seven, belonged to John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth. Richard, six, and Mary, four, went to the household of William Brewster, the Pilgrims’ spiritual leader.

Pilgrims John Carver, William Bradford and Miles Standish at prayer during their voyage to North America. 1844 painting by Robert Walter Weir.

Unbeknownst to their mother, the Mayflower love children set sail on Sept. 16, 1620. To some, it seemed like a death sentence.

To Samuel, it seemed the right thing to do to what he called “a spurious brood.” He justified his cruelty by claiming “great blotts and blemishes may fall upon them” at home.

Death Sentence

The voyage to the New World took a miserable nine-and-a-half weeks. The Mayflower, about 80 feet long, was grossly overcrowded with 102 passengers and 30 crew, along with pigs and chickens. The passengers subsisted on hardtack, salt pork, pickles, dried meat, oatmeal and beer—even the children.

On good days, the passengers could leave the cramped, fetid cabins below to get fresh air on deck. But October brought few good days, as North Atlantic storms tossed the little ship. Seasickness plagued the passengers, and the stench of vomit joined the stinking slop buckets below deck.

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Cabin of the Mayflower II.

The Mayflower anchored in Provincetown Harbor on Nov. 11, 1620. All the passengers had survived, except for William Butten, a servant who died three days before the Pilgrims sighted land.

But then others began to perish. It’s unclear exactly when the Mayflower love children began to succumb. Seven-year-old Jasper More probably died on Dec. 16 in Provincetown Harbor. Three others died during the weeks that the Mayflower lay anchored off Cape Cod.

Then in the terrible winter that followed, half the Mayflower voyagers perished. Scurvy had weakened many of them. That and other diseases carried them off, according to William Bradford.

Jasper’s older sister Elinor died in February. Mary, the youngest, died that winter as well, sometime before her fifth birthday.

Richard was the only one of the Mayflower love children to survive. He lived to a ripe old age, and his colorful life story is told in another post.

Why Those Two Girls?

Martyn Whittock, in Mayflower Lives, points out that 75 percent of the women, 36 percent of the boys and half the men died in Plymouth that winter. He notes that only two girls perished: Elinor and Mary, love children.

“That seems just too coincidental,” Whittock wrote. “One has a feeling that maybe, just maybe, one of the main reasons why Ellen and Mary More died was that they were not loved.”

Their mother in far-away England did love them. In 1622, Katherine More went to court again to find out what happened to her children. There she found out the terrible truth. Or at least part of it. She had no way of knowing that three of her children had died.

Of little Mary More, Whittock wrote,

[I]n the terrible upheavals and suffering that first disrupted, and then ended, the life of such a little girl we can see something of how a little innocent could get crushed between the turning iron wheels of legal and historical events; the determined actions of adults; and the cold ambitions of others.

Aftermath

In 1625, Samuel More married again. The next year, though, he had to get a royal pardon because, technically, he still had a living wife—Katherine.

hopton

The keep at Hopton Castle.

After that, Katherine More and Jacob Blakeway disappear from the historical record.

Samuel More, however, reappears again causing the death of others. During the English Civil War, Samuel More held Hopton Castle for the Parliamentarians. A Royalist force 500 strong stormed the castle, held by only 30 men. The Royalists offered to let the garrison surrender, but More refused. The Royalists massacred the Parliamentarians—all except Samuel More.

Anthony Wagner

In 1959, Jasper More went looking in his attic for old documents. His friend, genealogist Anthony Wagner, had suggested the search. More was a descendent of Richard More, the only Mayflower love child to survive to adulthood. More found the document of the 1622 court proceedings that tells the tragic tale of the Mayflower love children. Historians had their answer.

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With thanks to Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience by Martyn Whittock.

Images: Mayflower cabin By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57283684. Hopton Castle By Ostrich, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4360823. Mayflower plaque By Phil Revel, Shipton, Shropshire – https://www.flickr.com/photos/25709911@N08/6809987125, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269228. This story was updated in 2023.

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Alice Bishop, Pilgrim Murderess, Kills her 4-Year-Old Daughter

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The mystery of why Alice Bishop cut her four-year-old daughter’s throat in Plymouth Colony still lingers 370 years later.

Alice didn’t deny that she did it. In fact, she confessed right away when a neighbor saw the pool of blood on the floor of her home.

She had, apparently, been a good Pilgrim mother up until then. But she did it, and she hanged for it in the fall of 1648 at the Duxbury Fair.

A Fair Puritan, chromalithograph, by Pery Moran (detail)

Donna A. Watkins, a descendant of Alice Bishop, tells the story of her life in her book Diverse Gashes. Though Watkins doesn’t have a definitive answer, she does sort through the difficulties the Pilgrims’ endured just to survive. She especially focuses on the struggles faced by Pilgrim women to run the house and family while remaining subservient to men and achieving godly perfection—all under the prying eyes of the neighbors.

Alice Bishop

Alice first appears in the historical record as “Alice Martin” on the day she married George Clarke–Jan. 22, 1639 (N.S.).

Watkins believes Alice Bishop may have been related to William Bradford, who served as Plymouth’s governor on and off for 30 years and wrote Of Plimoth Plantation. How, or when, she arrived in Plymouth—or even whether she was born there—isn’t known. But her absence from the Pilgrims’ records suggests she didn’t cause trouble or engage in ‘unseemly behavior,’ Watkins argues.

Alice’s new husband George Clarke had bought a 10-acre plot of land with a small wooden house on it in a neighborhood called Playne Dealing, two miles north of Plymouth. George farmed, Alice tended the house. That meant getting up before dawn, building a fire, cooking over an open hearth, hauling water, spinning hemp or flax or grinding corn.

She gave birth to their first child, Abigail, in 1643. Her second, the ill-fated Martha, was born in 1644. George Clarke died, probably suddenly, around then.

A replica house in Plymouth Colony, similar to the one Alice Bishop lived in.

On Dec. 5, 1644, the widowed Alice Clarke married Richard Bishop, a hired man. It wasn’t unusual for widowed spouses to remarry quickly in colonial New England. The Bishops’ daughter Damaris was born in 1646. Richard and Alice seemed to get along, as no records exist of trouble between them.

Alice Bishop, Murderess

On Saturday, July 22, 1648, Alice Bishop would have been cooking meals for two days, since the Pilgrims forbade cooking on Sunday. Her husband was probably working in the fields. Abigail, then six, may have helped her mother with the chores.

Then a neighbor, 23-year-old Rachel Ramsden, stopped by the house to visit. Rachel noticed four-year-old Martha asleep on her bed. Alice gave her a kettle and asked her to borrow some buttermilk from Goodwife Winslow.

Alice had seemed normal, Rachel later testified. But when she returned, Alice seemed ‘sad and dumpish.’ Then Rachel noticed blood at the foot of the ladder leading to the attic. She asked about the blood. Alice pointed upstairs and told her to look.

Rachel, not seeing Martha in the bed, feared Alice had killed her, so she ran home to tell her parents. Her parents notified William Bradford, who quickly assembled three other men into a posse and went to the Bishop’s house.

The men later declared to the court what they saw: “…at the foot of a ladder which leads into an upper chamber, much blood; and going up, all of us, into the chamber, we found a woman child of about four years of age lying in her shift upon her left check with her throat cut with diverse gashes cross ways[.]”

The men then described the savagery of the attack: “…the wind pipe cut and stuck into the throat downward, and a bloody knife lying by the side of the child[.]”

They concluded that Alice Bishop had killed the child with the knife, and she confessed to them that she had.

But Why?

Donna Watkins notes that the court records tell us nothing about why Alice Bishop killed Martha Clarke. One possible explanation: Her older daughter did it, and Alice took the fall for it.

But Watkins delves further into another explanation. Perhaps Alice just suddenly lost control under the demands of constant physical labor, motherhood, marriage, a mixed family, snooping neighbors and the community’s expectations of perfect behavior. And to make it even harder to live in that overcontrolled Puritan environment, Alice Bishop as a woman only ranked as a second-class citizen.

The Pilgrims, Watkins noted, expected complete domestic harmony. Court records show plenty of actions against neighbors, but few against family or household members.  “They controlled their emotions at home at the expense of their relationships with their neighbors,” wrote Watkins.

She speculated that Rachel Ramsden, the neighbor, could have said something critical of Alice Bishop. Perhaps Martha should have been up and awake by then. And perhaps four-year-old Martha misbehaved, which caused Alice Bishop to suddenly fly into an uncontrolled rage and take a knife to her daughter’s throat.

William Bradford

William Bradford, then governor, may have had Alice Bishop in mind when he wrote about the reasons for evil to appear in Plymouth Colony. “…[A]s it is with waters when their streams are stopped or dammed up. When they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels.”

William Bradford

Bradford wrote those words between 1648 and 1650, around the time Alice Bishop went to the gallows for murdering her daughter. At that time, Bradford had sunk into sadness and despair. Many of the original Pilgrims had died, Plymouth had shrunk and settlers had scattered into new towns. It was then that he stopped writing Of Plimoth Plantation.

Watkins argues, plausibly, that the murder of Martha Clarke and the hanging of Alice Bishop, possibly his relatives, contributed to his depression.

Donna A. Watkins in her book Diverse Gashes: Governor William Bradford, Alice Bishop, and the Murder of Martha Clarke, Plymouth Colony, 1648, explores the reasons Alice Bishop may have slashed her four-year-old daughter’s throat.

Images: House and fence in Plimoth By Ben Franske – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4459090.

This story was updated in 2022.

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When John Alden Went to Jail for Murder

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Most school children know the story of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, but few know he went to jail for murder.

He didn’t stay long, and he didn’t do it, but the story reminds us that the Pilgrims strayed far from Plymouth Colony. They had a trading business in Maine that did so well it let them repay their considerable debt to their financial backers.

John Alden and Priscilla Mullins

John Alden

Not much is known about John Alden until he met the Pilgrims as a 21-year-old in Southampton, England. They hired him as the Mayflower’s cooper, to make the barrels and casks that carried all the food, drink, clothing and gunpowder on board the ship.

Alden could have gone back to England, but he chose to stay. It was a wise choice. He emerged as a leader of Plymouth Colony, serving on the Governor’s Council and as treasurer, deputy to the General Court and a member of the Council of War.

Alden also belonged to the group of eight who assumed a large debt.

London merchants had underwritten their Mayflower voyage and provisions to establish Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims, however, had a hard time repaying them during those lean first years—in fact, they ended up borrowing even more.

But they made a deal in 1626 that bought them time. The merchants’ partnership broke up, and eight colonists agreed to assume their debt in exchange for a monopoly on the fur trade along the Kennebec River in Maine.

The Kennebec Patent

The year before they made that deal, Plymouth Colony had had a good harvest with enough surplus corn to trade. “It pleased ye Lord to give ye plantation peace and health and contented minds, and so to bless their labours, and they had corne sufficient, (and some to spare to others,) with other foode,” wrote William Bradford.

A handful of young men, including John Howland, loaded the surplus corn into a shallop that came with them in the Mayflower. They then sailed it up the coast of Maine and up the mouth of the Kennebec River. At the head of the river they came upon an Abenaki village, where they traded the corn for 700 pounds of beaver fur.

That highly profitable trip convinced the colonists to set up a trading post, in what was known as Koussinoc or Cushnoc. Today it’s known as Augusta.

The Plymouth colonists managed to obtain a patent for the land along the Kennebec and to build a bigger boat to carry on their trade. They built a trading house and stocked it with trade goods: “coats, shirts, ruggs, & blankets, biskett, pease, prunes” and, of course, corn, according to Bradford.

Exporting beaver furs to Europe was a lucrative business. The Cushnoc trading post made enough profit for the Plymouth colonists to pay back their creditors in 12 years. They ran the trading post for 40.

cushnoc

Site, including plaque, of the Cushnoc trading post in Augusta.

But why did they have to go all the way to Maine to trade with indigenous people for beaver fur? Because Myles Standish had made an ill-considered attack on two Massachusett leaders, luring them to a meal and then killing them. That pretty much ruined relations with the local tribes with whom the Pilgrims had traded furs.

Another question: Why is history so silent on the Plymouth colonists’ trading post at Cushnoc? Some have speculated that the colonists themselves didn’t want word to get out about their money-making operation.

Murder on the Kennebec

John Howland ran the trading post for several years. John Alden, along with other Pilgrims such as Edward Winslow and William Bradford, visited Cushnoc to bring supplies.

Alden had come to Cushnoc in the spring of 1634 when a dispute broke out over trading rights. A man named John Hocking, or possibly Hoskins, from Piscataqua (New Hampshire) sailed up the Kennebec in a boat owned by his bosses, Lord Brook and Lord Saye (from whom Saybrook, Conn., took its name).

Hocking sailed past Cushnoc to trade with the Indians who would paddle down the Kennebec with canoes full of furs. The Plymouth colonists maintained they had exclusive rights to trade in the area and told Hocking to leave. Hocking refused, anchoring his vessel in the river.

John Alden, deputy governor at the time, told Howland to cut Hocking’s line. So Howland ordered four of his men to cut the cable to Hocking’s bark. They took a canoe into the river, and paddled toward Hocking, who threatened to shoot them unless they stopped. The Plymouth men cut one anchor cable, and then tried to cut the other. Hocking shot one man, Moses Talbot, dead.

The three remaining men returned fire, shooting John Hocking in the head and killing him.

“The rest of ye men carried home the vessel and ye sad tidings of these things,” wrote Bradford.

John Alden, Jailbird

Several months later, John Alden visited Boston on business, and the General Court ordered him jailed. A relative of John Hocking had brought a complaint against Alden.

Massachusetts Bay Colony had no jurisdiction over Plymouth or Kennebec, but went ahead and arrested him anyway. John Winthrop explained in his journal that they feared the king would send over a governor general once he got word of the unpleasantness at Kennebec. And the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony wished to continue to govern themselves.

new-england-living-standards-john-winthrop

Portrait of John Winthrop, American Antiquarian Society.

William Bradford sent Myles Standish to Boston to explain what happened, and Gov. Thomas Dudley set Alden free.

The Courtship of Priscilla and John Alden

What may not have happened to John Alden got far more historical recognition than what did happen.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem The Courtship of Miles Standish about a love triangle between Alden, Standish and Priscilla Mullins. Longfellow, through his mother, was descended from John and Priscilla. He claimed the story came down through his family.

In the tale, John Alden and Myles Standish are roommates in Plymouth Colony in 1621. Both have their eyes on Priscilla who was, in fact, the only marriageable woman in the colony at the time. Standish asks Alden to propose to Priscilla on his behalf. Priscilla replied, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”

Historian John Goodwin wrote there’s no reason for believing any of it. The story of John Alden going to jail, however, is true.

With thanks to Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Image of Cushnoc site By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=280178. This story was updated in 2023.

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Samuel Maverick Writes A Guide to the Wonders of New England – in 1660

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Samuel Maverick, as his name suggests, didn’t like to go along with the crowd. The Puritan crowd, that is.

He came to Boston sometime in the 1620s, before the Puritans arrived, and lived on Noddles Island in Boston Harbor. Noddles Island is now East Boston, which has a Maverick Square and a Maverick T stop.

Samuel Maverick, a firm Anglican and staunch royalist, saw amazing changes in New England during the first 30-some years of his residence. When he arrived, several hundred Europeans were scattered over 150 square miles of wilderness. By 1660, Maverick saw 86 towns that fielded militia, vast herds of livestock, an abundance of English fruit, and harbors bustling with many dozens of ships, some as large as 300 tons.

Other changes he didn’t like so much. He chafed under the Puritans’ rigid laws and suffered from their religious intolerance. Another Samuel Maverick – who may have been a descendant – shared his independent spirit in 19th century Texas. The Maverick name would brand movies and cars and sports teams into the 21st century.

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East Boston, 1841. The large building in the center is the Maverick Hotel.

Samuel Maverick

He was born in England around 1602, the son of the Rev. John Maverick, who later followed him to the New World.

Samuel arrived in Massachusetts when in his twenties. With another colonist named David Thompson he built a house on Noddles Island and fortified it with guns. Thompson died, and Maverick married Thompson’s widow, Amias. They had three children in addition to her son by David Thompson.

When Maverick started out in Massachusetts, fewer than 300 Europeans lived within a radius of 150 miles.  Then in 1630, John Winthrop and his band of Puritans arrived and started running the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Things would change dramatically in a few decades.

Maverick Guide to New England

In 1660, Samuel Maverick returned to England with a guide he wrote about New England. He intended to present it to King Charles II, along with his complaints about how the Puritans treated him.

He called the guide A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof. In it, he described 86 towns from Damariscotta, Maine, to Greenwich, Conn. Maverick described how New England had once had only a sparse population of scattered colonists. By 1660, however, almost all of those towns could field a militia (“a full Company of Foote and some Horse”).

boston map

Changes in the Boston shoreline from 1630-1675

When he first arrived in New England, he wrote, he found nothing but shacks save for three or four decent houses in Plymouth. Boston, which wasn’t even Boston then, was “a swamp and pound.” It grew into a “great Towne” with “two churches, a Gallant Statehouse & more to make it compleate, then can be expected in a place so late a wilderness.”

“Now to behold the handsome Houses & Churches in so many Townes as I have named is a wonder,” wrote Maverick.

Wonders

Farming and husbandry had flourished in every town he mentioned.

In 1626 New England had not a single head of cattle, nor horse, nor sheep, and very few goats or hogs. But less than 40 years later, New Englanders exported livestock to the Caribbean, consumed much of it themselves and provisioned the ships that called at New England ports.

Along with the livestock, “the great abundance of English Fruite, as Apples, Pears, Apricots, Plumbs, Cherries Musk-Mellons, Water-Mellons &c. is not to be beleeved but by those that have seene it,” wrote Maverick.

Massachusetts also had harbors filled with “great Shipps of Burthen” and “many Vessels…of all sorts and seizes,” he wrote. “And I am confident there hath not in any place out of so small a number of People been raised so many able Seamen and Commanders as there hath been.”

In southern New England, he wrote, “it is incredible what hath been done.”

The Puritan by August Saint-Gaudens. Samuel Maverick chafed under their intolerance

Majority Rule

As colonists carved towns out of the wilderness, the Puritans gained power at the expense of the minority Anglicans. They took over Maine, then largely Anglican, and they persecuted Thomas Morton, a free-thinking Anglican in Braintree. They cast out nonconformists, who often ended up in free-thinking Rhode Island.

The Puritans also created and enforced a set of laws that reserved privileges for members of the Puritan church, or freemen. Samuel Maverick was not one of them. As such, he couldn’t hold government office, but he had to pay taxes. He also couldn’t take communion and he couldn’t have his children baptized.

Nevertheless, Samuel Maverick prospered and contributed to the community’s defense. Contemporaries described him as a  “whole-souled, generous, hospitable man, of warm impulses and courteous behavior.” He was “a royalist and Episcopalian, living in a strongly fortified residence on Noddle’s Island,” according to A History of East Boston: With Biographical Sketches of Its Early Proprietors, and an Appendix, by William Hylsop Sumner.

puritan ban

Intolerance

Ironically, Maverick owned three slaves. His treatment of them is another story. Suffice it to say he felt he was the one denied civil and religious liberties.

By 1647, Maverick and others began to resent the colony’s rigid laws. He joined several others in a petition to end taxation without representation and to gain basic civil and religious rights.

They complained the colony did not base its laws on the fundamental laws of England. The government also denied them the same civic and religious privileges as the church members, or freemen. They protested they were entitled to those privileges as “freeborn Englishmen of sober lives and conversation.”

Maverick and the other petitioners threatened to take their complaints to England if the Puritans didn’t cave in to their demands.

And so the Puritans sent him to jail for conspiracy and perjury and slapped him with a steep fine. After 12 days he paid the fine and went free.

Successful Complaint, Failed Commission

Maverick wasn’t going to get any satisfaction in England while the English Civil War raged. Nor would he while Oliver Cromwell ruled the country. But when Charles II restored the Crown in 1660, Samuel Maverick headed straight for England to air his complaints about the Puritans to the King.

He brought with him the little book he’d written, outlining the lay of the land. A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof received the King’s attention. For centuries it rested in private hands, its existence unknown to but a few. Then in 1875 its owner put the book up for auction and the British Museum bought it.

charles ii

King Charles II

His little book convinced the king he needed to rein in his independent colonies. Maverick returned to New England in a position of authority as one of four commissioners. The King charged the commissioners with enforcing liberty of conscience and oaths of allegiance as well as forcing local militias to follow the King’s orders.

The commissioners couldn’t exercise their power, though, and Samuel Maverick moved to New York. He is believed to have died sometime around 1670.

Maverick’s Brief Description

Here are excerpts from his descriptions of 20 towns from Maine to Connecticut. (To see all 86, click here.)

Note his disapproval with how the Massachusetts Puritans took over Maine towns, originally settled by Anglicans like himself.  And he makes clear his disdain for the poor, weak and Dutch-friendly Plymouth Colony.

Map of New England, 1677

Maine

  • Pem˜a—Westward from Penobscott (which is the Southermost Fort in Nova Scotia) … is Pem˜aquid…many Families are now settled there… by vertue of [a patent granted by King James I] they hold the Islands of Monahegan and Damerells Coue, and other small ones adjacent Commodious for fishing.
  • Casco Bay.— In this Casco Bay are many scattering Families settled…[Col.] Alexander Rigby…[held the patent] and under this Goverment the People lived some yeares, till of late the Government of the Massachusits hath made bold to stretch its Jurisdiction to the midle of this Bay, and as lyeing in their way have taken in a dozen of Goverments more.

New Hampshire

  • Strawberry Bank. The Great House & Isle of Shooles.—Within 2 Myles of the Mouth is Strawberry Banke where are many Families, and a Minister & a Meeting House …This Strawberry Banke is part of 6000 acres granted by Patent about yeyeare 1620 or 1621, to Mr David Thompson, who with… assistance … went over with a Considerable Company of Servants and built a Strong and Large House, enclosed it with a large and high Palizado and mounted Gunns, and being stored extraordinarly with shot and Ammunition was a Terror to the Indians, who at that time were insulting over the poor weake and unfurnished Planters of Plymouth… all is at this day in the power and at the disposall of the Massachusitts. Two Leagues of lyes the Isle of Shooles one of the best places for ffishing in the land, they have built a Church here and maintaine a Minister.

Massachusetts

  • Newbury—… the Houses stand at a good distance each from other a feild and Garden between each house, and so on both sides the street for 4 Miles…
  • Salem—… very commodious for fishing, and many Vessells have been built there and (exceptBoston) it hath as much Trade as any place in New England.
  • Marblehead or Foy.—… the greatest Towne for ffishing in New England.
  • Lynne—… within the bounds of it are the greatest Iron works…
  • Cambridge—[In] Cambridge … is a Colledge a Master and some Number of Students belonging to it…

    boston-statehouse

    The Old State House in Boston

  • Boston—the Metrapolis of New England lying pleasantly on a plaine and the ascending of a High Mount which lyes about the midle of yeplaine, …It hath two handsome Churches in it, a handsome market place, and in the midest of it a Statehouse. In the Towne are fouer full companys of ffoote and a Troope of horse…The Towne is full of good shopps well furnished with all kind of Merchandize
  • Braintree—once called Mount Wolaston, … It subsists by raiseing provisions, and furnishing Boston with wood.
  • New Plymouth.—… This place was seated about yeyeare 1620 or 1621 by a company of Brownists, …[They] found this place and there settled liveing extream hardy for some yeares and in great danger of the Indians, and could not Long have subsisted, had not Plymouth Merchants …at Monhegon and Pascattaway … supplyed them…It is a poor small Towne now, The People being removed into Farmes in the Country.
  • Sandwich—a good Towne … which affords good store of Provisions, and some yeares a quantity of Whalebone made of Whales which drive up dead in that Bay.

Rhode Island

  • Rhode Island.— It is full of people haveing been a receptacle for people of severall Sorts and Opinions.
  • Warwick Providence.— I think they still keepe a seeming forme of Goverment but to litle purpose, none submitting to Supream Authority but as they please.

Connecticut

  • (Pequot Plantation, now Mystic and Stonington—Haveing gone through New Plymouth Goverment we come next to Connecticot Goverment. The first that was under this Goverment was Pequate
  • Hartford—From Withersfield to Hartford the Metropolis of the Goverment, it is about 3 Miles, it is a gallant Towne, and many rich men in it.
  • Springfield— This is the Massachusetts bounds. And above Springfeild 8 Miles is another Towne at first Intended but for a tradeing house with the Indians, but the gallant Land about it hath invited men to make it a Toune. This Connecticott River is a great River before yeTowne[which] is also in the Massachusetts bounds and under its Goverment although 8 Miles from it.

    new haven colony

    Woodcut of New Haven, 1786

  • Newhaven—This Towne is the Metropolis of that Goverment, and the Goverment tooke its Name from this Towne; … was the first built in those parts, many stately and costly houses were erected the Streete layd out in a Gallant forme, a very stately Church; but yeHarbour proveing not Comodious, the land very barren, the Merchants either dead or come away, the rest gotten to their Farmes, The Towne is not so glorious as once it was.
  • Milford—From Newhaven to Milford it is about 10 Miles, This Towne is gotten into some way of Tradeing to Newfoundland, Barbados, Virginia, So also hath some other Townes in this Goverment.
  • Greenwich—From Stamford to Greenwich…these two last Townes are under Newhaven Goverment, and there was another place begun and much done in it, but the Dutch came and tooke it by force, and since the people of this Towne call it New Chester…

The Rest of the Story

New England had no shortage of Mavericks, and it’s hard to tell who was the ancestor of the famous Maverick who moved to Texas as a baby. That Maverick, also Samuel, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, served as mayor of San Antonio, owned huge tracts of land and practiced law. He also had a few cows. He didn’t brand his cattle, and, according to lore, those who strayed into another rancher’s herd were called mavericks.

His grandson Maury Maverick coined the term ‘gobbledygook.’

This story was updated in 2022. Image of map of New England: By http://maps.bpl.org – A map of New England, being the first that ever was here cut … places, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27807459.

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The Dutch in New England: More Than Sinterklaas and Koekjes

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Today the remnants of the colonial Dutch in New England are pretty much limited to the region’s outer rim: At Smith’s Castle in North Kingstown, R.I., in Vermont’s oldest house in Pownal, on Leyden Street in Plymouth, Mass. and on a historic sign in Castine, Maine.

But the Dutch had more of a presence in early New England than along the perimeter, and far more than commonly acknowledged. The Dutch claimed much of Connecticut, for example, before English settlers crowded them out. The early Plymouth and Massachusetts colonists might not have survived had the Dutch not brought trade goods like tools and cheese, cannon and livestock. Rhode Islanders had an especially cozy relationship with Dutch traders, and the Dutch claimed part of Downeast Maine.

William of Orange

Don’t forget King William III was also a Dutch staedtholder.

When thinking about the history of British North America It’s easy to forget that William of Orange seized the English throne in 1688 with the help of Dutch troops. King Williams was not only a French prince but also a staedtholder – a Dutch earl or a duke — of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic.

Decades later, the English Parliament decided to tax tea to discourage the Dutch from smuggling the stuff into the colonies – hence the Boston Tea Party. The Dutch were also the first to salute the American flag and, therefore, the first to acknowledge the independence of the United States on November 16, 1776.

The Dutch in New England

In early 17th century New England, colonists depended on Dutch traders because they had to. England was still recovering from Henry VIII’s shenanigans and had some catching up to do. Amsterdam, not London, had grown into the European capital of shipping, banking and finance.

“The British government and the British commercial world had not yet got their colonial act together,” wrote Charlotte Wilcoxen. The country ‘was still inexperienced at coordinating the production and distribution of goods,’ she wrote. “Her American colonies, victims of this ineptitude, were forced to look to the Dutch for supplies.”

fluyt

A Dutch trading vessel, known as a fluyt.

In the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries, the Dutch were leading traders in the world, with outposts in Thailand, Brazil, Africa, Indonesia and the Caribbean.

Dutch merchants may have traded on the coast of New England as early as 1598. And they didn’t differ from the other European powers in wanting to expand in North America. One big reason: soft gold, otherwise known as beaver.

Beavers

From about 1550, all the best people in Europe had to have a beaver hat. They were soft, attractive, durable and expensive. The beaver hat craze nearly drove the Eurasian beaver to extinction, and sent trappers and traders to North America from Europe.

laughing cavalier

Nice hat. The Laughing Cavalier by Franz Hals.

Dutch traders set up trading posts along the coast from Maryland to Maine, and up the Hudson, Connecticut and Delaware rivers. They bought beaver furs from Indians in exchange for trade goods. They learned from the Pequot how to use wampum, or zewant, and then taught the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony how to do it.

In 1621, the Dutch government chartered the West India Company to, among other things, exploit the beaver trade and colonize North America. Three years later the Netherlands sent colonists to try to settle a wide swath Northeast territory.

In addition to New Amsterdam (New York) and Fort Nassau (Albany) the Dutch in New England eventually had a fort in Hartford, called Fort Hope. They also built a fort called Roduins, or Red Dunes, at the mouth of the Housatonic River. They had a trading post on Quetenis, what is now Dutch Island in Jamestown, R.I., and briefly set up a fort and a warehouse in Old Saybrook, Conn. The Dutch may also have settled along the coast of Maine.

Traces of the Dutch presence in the eastern part of upper New York State can be found in the Mooar-Wright House. Built around 1762, it has a Dutch frame around a typically English layout.

Mooar-Wright House

Bye-Bye Beaver

If beaver mortality is any indication, New England and Europe kept up a brisk trade during the first half of the 17th century.

Europe’s insatiable appetite for beaver fur kept New England’s Indians busy trapping the creatures. The Dutch in New England tried to keep up with their demand for knives, axes, glassware and wool. From 1626 to 1632, the Dutch sent 52,584 beaver pelts back to the Netherlands.

It only got worse for the beaver. By 1650, trappers and traders were sending 80,000 beaver pelts a year to England and the Netherlands. Fifty years later, the once-plentiful beaver had disappeared completely from Massachusetts, and soon after vanished from Vermont and Connecticut.

Massachusetts

In 1635, a Dutch vessel stopped in Marblehead with 140 tons of salt and 10,000 pounds of tobacco. They probably sold salt to Marblehead’s cod fishermen before sailing back to Europe to unload their tobacco.

Dutch merchants also bought tobacco from Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims, after all, had lived for about a dozen years in Leiden, about 30 miles southwest of Amsterdam, and undoubtedly spoke at least some Dutch. When they arrived in Plymouth they built houses on Leyden Street in 1620. It’s still there.

Leyden Street in the 1800s

Plymouth Gov. William Bradford reported ‘profitable commerce’ with the New Amsterdam Dutch for ‘diverse years.’ Plymouth colonist Isaac Allerton brokered the sale of a Dutch ship from two Dutchmen in New Amsterdam.

Next door in Massachusetts, Gov. John Winthrop noted in his journal that the two colonies often traded with the ‘Dutch at Hudson’s River’ for sheep, beaver, cannon, sugar, wine and linen. Massachusetts, in fact, did so much trade with the Dutch that the colony used Dutch currency and passed a law in 1643 regulating its use.

One reason Massachusetts had to use Dutch currency was that the English Civil War, which started in 1642, pretty much ended trade between England and the colonies for a while. Colonists who needed supplies had to go Dutch — or perhaps Venetian or Spanish.

Today The Dutch House in Brookline, Mass., serves as a memorial of sorts to the Dutch in New England.  Built as a pavilion in the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Brookline resident Charles Brooks Appleton saw it, bought it and had it moved to his hometown.

Rhode Island, aka Roode Eylandt

On the shore of Mill Cove off Narragansett Bay stands a large, plain, wooden house in a clearing. A Rhode Island merchant named Richard Smith, Jr., built it in 1678, after Narragansett Indians burned down the previous house during King Philip’s War. Smith fortified the big old colonial with two small cannons, thus earning the name “Smith’s Castle.” Today it’s a house museum, which in 2019 scheduled a holiday event, Christmas at the Castle, celebrating ‘Dutch influence on colonial life.’

Rhode Islanders like Smith got rich trading with the Dutch in New England. Dutch explorer Adriaen Block had explored Rhode Island and the interior of Connecticut in 1614, naming Block Island after himself and probably naming Rhode Island “Roode Eylandt.”  The Dutch even tried to claim Rhode Island as a colony.

smith castle

Smith Castle

Trading With the Dutch in New England

Nevertheless, Rhode Island probably had the most sustained and cordial trade relations with the Dutch in New England, according to Charlotte Wilcoxen. Rhode Islanders who did business with the Dutch included William Coddington, William Brenton, John Underhill, John Throgmorton and the father and son pair of Richard Smith.

Richard Smith, Sr., had set up a trading post in a place they called Cocumscussoc, now North Kingstown, with his business partner, Roger Williams. In 1651, he built a house there, 20 miles from the nearest settlement. Smith also had trading posts in Taunton, Mass., and in New Amsterdam, where he lived part time. He sent fish, beaver and salt to Europe in exchange for manufactured goods. Slaves and sugar came from the Dutch in the West Indies.

After Richard Smith died in 1666, his son Richard took over the business. Today the Smith Castle docents will tell you his family incorporated Dutch holiday traditions – such as Sinterklaas and koekjes — into their daily life.

Anglo-Dutch Wars

In the mid-17th century the English began to block Dutch shipping in the English Channel and along other trade routes. That caused three Anglo-Dutch Wars, fought primarily at sea. The first broke out in 1652 and ended in 1654. The second lasted from 1664-67, and the third from 1672-74.

The New England colonies kept up commerce and correspondence with the Dutch during the wars. Rhode Islanders especially honored bans on Dutch trade more in the breach than in the observance.

Huys de Hoop, Connecticut

Connecticut probably had the testiest relations with the Dutch in New England, perhaps because familiarity bred contempt. Connecticut, after all, was cheek-by-jowl with New Amsterdam, and the Dutch early on claimed both the Connecticut and New Haven colonies.

dutch settlement map

Dutch settlements

The Dutch called the Connecticut River the Versche, or Fresh, River, and the Dutch made good use of it in the early 17th century. They traded beaver for trade goods with the Indians. In 1633, they built a fort called Huys de Hoop, or House of Hope, on a tributary of the Versche in what is now Hartford. Today Huyshope Avenue connects the Connecticut Probation Department at one end with Aetna Ambulance Services at the other.

The Dutch intended the House of Hope to serve as the capital of Dutch Connecticut, which had amounted to a few tiny, scattered settlements – in Branford, Old Saybrook and New Haven. But they couldn’t keep up with the influx of English immigrants fleeing the Puritans in Massachusetts.

Groenwits

One exception was Greenwich, in the far southwestern corner of Connecticut. Today it’s called the Entryway to New England. In 1640, the Dutch considered it the westernmost settlement of New Amsterdam.

That year, two Massachusetts families, the Feakes and the Patricks, bought land from the Indians and called it Elizabeth’s Neck. Massachusetts had banished them for their support of the heretical Anne Hutchinson. The Feakes later built a house, the Feake-Ferris House, in what is now Old Greenwich.

Three months after their arrival, armed Dutch soldiers from New Amsterdam showed up in Elizabeth’s Neck. They gave the Feakes and the Patricks a choice: submit to Dutch rule or leave. They submitted. The Dutch then changed the settlement’s name to Groenwits and held it for the next 16 years.

Coincidentally, Greenwich was one of the first Connecticut towns to suffer Dutch Elm Disease in 1934.

Squabbling

The Dutch and the ever-increasing English squabbled constantly over their borders in Connecticut. It didn’t take long for English settlers from Massachusetts to surround the House of Hope in Windsor, Wethersfield and Hartford. Finally in 1650 the English and Dutch settled their boundary 50 miles west of the Connecticut River.  Greenwich stayed with the Dutch.

The Dutch relinquished those claims at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667. In exchange, they got concessions on the Indonesian spice trade including, ironically, nutmeg.

The Dutch eventually realized they couldn’t compete with the exploding English population in Connecticut. So they decided to consolidate their North American colony at the tip of Manhattan in New Amsterdam.

New Amsterdam

But even the retreat to New Amsterdam was fraught. The leadership in England, kings and Cromwell alike, dearly wanted to oust the Dutch from the North American colonies.

During the first Anglo-Dutch War, Oliver Cromwell outfitted an invasion force under Robert Sedgwick to take over New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam stayed in Dutch hands only because the two nations declared peace. Sedgwick turned north and captured Acadia instead.

Then after Charles II got his throne back he decided he wanted New Amsterdam for his brother, the Duke of York. On Aug. 27, 1664, four English frigates under the command of Richard Nicholl sailed into the harbor. The Dutch, with few supplies, quickly surrendered.

new amsterdam

New Amsterdam in 1884

As a Dutch minister, Samuel Drisius, wrote, “No relief or assistance could be expected while daily great numbers of Englishmen arrived from New England both on foot and on horseback hotly bent upon plundering this place.”

The city, now New York, stayed in English hands until July 1673, when it reverted to the Dutch. The Dutch held it until the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, when they gave it up in exchange for Surinam.

The Dutch influence in the region can still be seen in the region, from architecture to place names to New York Mets uniforms. The blue, white and orange colors go back to the 17th-century Prinsenvlag, or Prince’s Flag, the naval flag of the States-General of the Dutch Republic.

Maine

In 1857, a military historian named Maj. Gen. J. Watts De Peyster read a paper before the New York Historical Society about Dutch settlement and exploration 250 years earlier.

“There never was a good piece of land that the Devil did not open his bag and shake out some Dutchman upon it,” he said. That land included ‘the rich lumber districts of Maine.’ The Dutch, he said, made several attempts to settle Maine to ‘share the prolific fisheries; the unsurpassed masting and lumbering facilities; and, at that time, the rich fur trade.’

Though Maine was, in the early 17th century, the Province of Acadie, the Dutch planted the flag at least on the shores of Muscongus Bay at what is now Bremen. De Peyster said the Dutch language was perpetrated in the town by a steady stream of Germans who followed in the footsteps of those early settlers.

He also claimed a Dutch settlement had existed at one time on the Sheepscot River a mile above Wiscasset, and at Pemaquid.

For a century, de Peysters argument was neither proven nor disproven. But by the end of the 20th century, archaeologists found extensive Dutch artifacts along the coast from Maine to Maryland.

The Flying Horse

Historians have not disputed the Dutch conquest of Castine. In August of 1674, the Flying Horse, a Dutch frigate, sailed into Penobscot Bay. The fighting force of 110 men easily overtook the 30 French soldiers at the fort of Pentagoet.

Marker showing the Dutch in New England

The Dutch commander, Capt. Jurriaen Aernoutsz, viewed Pentagoet as fair game. The French had allied with the English during the third Anglo-Dutch War. Though the English had settled with the Dutch, the French had not.

Aernoutsz then captured another French fort at Jemseg, and in both places he buried a bottle with a message in it. The message said Acadia belonged to the Dutch and was to be known as ‘New Holland.’ But he sailed away, the Dutch couldn’t hang on to Acadia and soon the French recovered the territory. They gave Pentagoet a new name, Bagaduce, but today it is known as Castine.

Dutch-American Heritage Day

Fast forward a century. On Nov. 16, 1776, an American warship, the Andrew Doria, sailed into the harbor of the Dutch Caribbean island Sint Eustatius. The Dutch governor ordered a friendly cannon salute. That angered the British, and they took control of the island a few years later. The Dutch got it back in 1784. In 1990, that day was proclaimed “Dutch-American Heritage Day.”

The Andrew Doria in Sint Eustatius 


With thanks to Dutch Trade and Ceramics in America in the Seventeenth Century by Charlotte Wilcoxen and The New Netherlands Institute.

Images: Castine sign By No machine-readable author provided. Masonbarge assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=696875. Smith’s Castle By Mlanni98 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77139260. This story was updated in 2023.

 

 

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Nine Men’s Misery: ‘Oldest Veterans Memorial’ Honors Tortured Plymouth Colonists

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On the wooded grounds of an old monastery in Cumberland, R.I., a pile of stones stands next to a cement pillar with a plaque on it. Called Nine Men’s Misery, people describe it as the oldest veteran’s memorial in the United States. It commemorates the death of nine men killed by Narragansett Indians during King Philip’s War.

Forty miles to the south lies another monument in another woods. A granite obelisk off a hiking trail marks the massacre of an estimated 700 Narragansett men, women and children by colonial militia. Known as the Great Swamp Fight, it led directly to the death of the nine men in Cumberland.

Together, the old stone markers tell at least part of the story of the Narragansett involvement in King Philip’s War. And over the years, the message of one of those monuments changed.

The message of the other has stayed pretty much the same. And it remains a monument to a myth.

Nine-men-s-misery-map

From Nine Men’s Misery to the Great Swamp Fight. Map courtesy Google maps.

King Philip’s War

For many years King Philip, also known as Metacomet, had followed in the footsteps of his father, Massasoit. He maintained peace between his tribe, the Wampanoag, and the colonists, as his father had with the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony.

But over the next decades the English encroached on far too much of the Wampanoag’s land. They forced the Indians to agree to a humiliating treaty and then unfairly condemned three Wampanoag to death.

To prepare for war, King Philip, assembled an alliance of native tribes to fight the English colonists.

King Philip’s War started in June 1675 without the Narragansetts. They had signed a treaty of neutrality with Massachusetts Bay Colony. And Rhode Island, led by an aging Roger Williams, tried to stay out of the war as well.

It wasn’t to be.

nine-men's-misery-king-philip

King Philip

The war that followed devastated both sides. It destroyed about a third of New England’s towns and cost Plymouth Colony eight percent of its adult male population. As many as a thousand Indians were sold into slavery, and 5,000 died in battle, of sickness or starvation. Another 2,000 fled west or north.

The Great Swamp Fight

King Phillip decided to take advantage of the Narragansett pledge of neutrality. He sent noncombatants — women, children, the old and the infirm — to safety in the Narragansett winter settlement in the Great Swamp. But on Dec. 19, 1675, Benjamin Church led a 1,000-man militia from Plymouth, Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies into Rhode Island. They marched to the Great Swamp, now in South Kingstown, and they massacred an estimated 700 Indian men, women and children.

In 1906, descendants of the colonists and members of the Narragansett tribe dedicated a 20-foot-high granite obelisk to commemorate the battle.

Three Narragansett women stood in the rain and unveiled a marker that read,

Attacked within their fort upon this island, the Narragansett Indians made their last stand in King Philip’s War and were crushed by the united forces of the Massachusetts Connecticut and Plymouth Colonies in the “Great Swamp Fight,” Sunday, 19 December, 1675.

This record was placed by the Rhode Island Society of Colonial Wars, 1906.

In the 1930s, an Indian historian named Princess Red Wing held a much different kind of ceremony at the Great Swamp. She helped redefine the meaning of the battle site – as a tragic massacre rather than a glorious battle victory.

Native Americans have held the Great Swamp Massacre Ceremony annually since then. They light fires, call the roll of fallen soldiers, sing, dance and give speeches. And by doing so, they make it clear that neither the Great Swamp Fight nor King Philip’s War extinguished the Narragansett people.

By Astoddard73 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51159108

The Great Swamp Fight memorial

Pierce’s Fight

The Great Swamp Fight drew both Rhode Island and the Narragansetts into King Philip’s War.

In retaliation for the massacre, the Narragansett leader Conanchet organized several tribes into two armies. One army in Massachusetts attacked and destroyed most of the settlements in central Massachusetts. The southern army burned towns in Rhode Island along Narragansett Bay.

On March 26, 1676, the Narragansetts baited a trap for a Plymouth Colony militia led by Capt. Michael Pierce.  Pierce marched his men to what is now Cumberland, where they spied several Indians who appeared wounded. Pierce’s militia chased the Indians to a bend in the Blackstone River. There, Pierce realized the Indians had lured him into an ambush.

The Narragansetts overpowered the colonial militia after a battle known as Pierce’s Fight. Exactly how many Indians took part in the fight will probably never be known, but scholars claim 1,000 is a reasonable estimate. The militia, including friendly Indians, numbered about 65.

Nine Men’s Misery

The legend of Nine Men’s Misery begins sometime after Pierce’s fight ended. A rescue party supposedly came across nine scalped dead men and buried their bodies. They then stacked a pile of rocks as a memorial to the slain soldiers.

nine-men's-misery-site

Nine Men’s Misery marker, placed in 1928

According to the myth, the Indians captured nine men who were part of Pierce’s militia and tortured them to death. Or the Indians seated the prisoners on a rock and did a war dance while they decided what to do with them. Because the Indians couldn’t agree on a form of torture, they simply tomahawked and then scalped the prisoners. One account even had the Indians carving smiles onto their faces to mock the promises broken by the colonists.

The Narragansetts went on to burn Providence and other towns, but the colonists soon captured and killed Canonchet. The war pretty much ended on Aug. 12, 1676 with the shooting death and dismemberment of King Philip, though skirmishes continued for more than a year.

A Tangled Tale

In 1790, some medical students started to dig up the bodies to study their anatomy, but outraged locals stopped them. The bodies were then reburied, the rocks reassembled and the myth of Nine Men’s Misery continued.

A century later, an order of Trappist monks bought the property and built a monastery on it. In 1928, they cemented a pile of rocks together on the alleged site of Nine Men’s Misery, and the Rhode Island Historical Society placed a marker next to it. The marker reads:

Nine Men’s Misery

On This Spot

Where They Were Slain By

The Indians

Were Buried the Nine Soldiers

Captured in Pierce’s Fight

March 26, 1676

A Myth May Have Some Truth

In 2011, a graduate student named Lawrence K. LaCroix investigated the facts surrounding Pierce’s Fight. He found no evidence, written or archaeological, “to support an association with Captain Pierce, the King Philip’s War, or even the 17th century.”

LaCroix concluded Nine Men’s Misery was mostly legend, but it had some semblance of truth.

He found that someone unearthed skeletal remains somewhere in Cumberland, probably a mile south of Nine Men’s Misery. Then around 1790, after the medical students went grave digging, someone reburied the bodies at or near Nine Men’s Misery.

Soon after the monks bought the property in 1900, the bodies were once again disinterred. The Rhode Island Historical Society accepted them and kept them in the basement of the John Brown House, which it owns.

Then in 1976, the remains of the nine bodies were ceremonially reburied elsewhere.

The monastery burned down in 1950, and the monks sold the property to the town. But the legend of Nine Men’s Misery continues, for example, in promotional materials for Blackstone Valley tourism.

Perpetuating that myth, concluded LaCroix,

reinforces nineteenth century public attitudes toward patriotic inspiration, obstructs the construction of a more factual battle account and unfairly biases readers’ perceptions of Native Americans.

With thanks to Lawrence K. LaCroix, Captain Pierce ‘s Fight: An Investigation Into a King Philip’s War Battle and its Remembrance and Memorialization.

The Great Swamp Fight Memorial , 41 Great Swamp Monument Rd., West Kingston, R.I. Image by By Astoddard73 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51159108.

Nine Men’s Misery is at Diamond Hill Rd., Cumberland, R.I. This story was updated in 2023.

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